Unknown Collaborator (Pari Intervallo)
The Unknown Collaborator (Pari Intervallo), Installed in Abandon School in San Antonio Texas
“The Unknown Collaborator” references sketches I made of a laminated inkjet printout of the facial area of the Shroud of Turin, which I found in a funky thrift store in Socorro, New Mexico and purchased for 25 cents. The source material is absurd because it only meets the Nihil tenet of Non-Mediation on the technicality that I was looking directly at an object found on the Nihil route. Yet the intention to place the piece near “Out of Existence XXIV,” a tribute both to the actual unknown collaborator with whom I made OOE and to a long-deceased middle school classmate, is sincere. You can read more about that work here. It’s this space between the sacred and absurd I’m most interested in with Nihil. In a sense, the portrait I’m placing next to a minimalist-seeming white painting underscored with a red shoe is meant as a kind of projection of how I envision either the collaborator or Lucas if they were alive today.
Out of Existence XXIV (for Lucas) | 82.5 x 47 in, | Mixed Media on Found Bulletin Board, Ossified Shoe in Collaboration with Anonymous Artist | c.2000-2022
Of course, we know the face in the shroud of Turin was meant to be the face of Christ, even as it was a hoax (an early photographic process) in its own day. One is able to see the face either as a swindle to manipulate public reaction, or as a kind of genuine yearning to visualize or resurrect one whose felt absence makes itself present in the individual or collective psyche. In my individual case, even to “represent” them through a dime-store Christ image is to represent, as is often true, my own late brother. In Nihil, this present absence is referred to as the Archaic Brother.
Like all of my paintings, “The Unknown Collaborator” is several layers thick, different from other works only in that every layer contains the same image, the Shroud of Turin. I had always wanted the painting to be red, as with the traces of red in “Out of Existence” and the shoe beneath it. But in Nihil, I cannot consciously select my palette. It has to be arrived at through a simple mathematical system as inspired by the composer Arvo Pärt. This is both because of the tenet of Color and the tenet of Non-Preference (not published yet). And so, I knew that whenever the cycle allowed me to arrive at red, that would be my final layer. Again there is the absurdity in not allowing myself to use red to make a red painting, yet because of the absurd process, the work takes on a presence and physicality that would not have been possible otherwise.
Its subtitle, like many others, comes from the 1976 Arvo Pärt composition of the same name. It translates from the Latin, “in the equal distance.” The musical piece is built on two parallel voices whose distance remains the same throughout, and the piece is written for four unspecified instruments. With that in mind, I painted it in four layers, leaving red for last. Its parallel voice is mean to be “Out of Existence XXIV”
Every painting in Nihil is meant to feel as if it could be only this one specific version of itself, that it could never happen twice, and even perhaps, that it barely holds together. Some paintings might reference imagery which I found to be absurd, as with “Unknown Collaborator”, only to reveal something which feels deeply meaningful. Others might reference an image, experience, encounter, etc. that I feel very seriously about, but which is treated lightly, and appears outrageous and energetic. I frequently look for opportunities to marry opposites in the course of a work.
The Unknown Collaborator (Pari Intervallo) | Mixed Media on Linen | 73.5 x 49 in. | 2023